Video: The wide world of layer enhancements

In this movie, I'm going to walk you through a bunch of minor but much-needed enhancements to layers inside Photoshop CS6, and I'm going to save my favorites for the end. So be sure to watch the entire thing. Let's start things off with the Eyedropper. I'll go ahead and click on it here in the toolbox. Now as many of you know, the Eyedropper by default is set to lift the composite color. So in other words, if I click on the model's forehead, I'm seeing the color of that pixel as it appears on screen, subject to all the layers working together.

In this course, Deke McClelland offers a sneak peek at the new features in Photoshop CS6. He reveals the secrets behind the new dark interface, searchable layers, the powerful Blur Gallery, Camera Raw 7, video editing, and the Adaptive Wide Angle filter, which removes distortion from extreme wide-angle photographs and panoramas. Deke also covers the new nondestructive Crop tool, dashed strokes, paragraph and character styles, editable 3D type, and the exciting Content-Aware Move tool, which moves selections and automatically heals the backgrounds.

The wide world of layer enhancements

In this movie, I'm going to walk you through a bunch of minor but much-neededenhancements to layers inside Photoshop CS6, and I'm going to save myfavorites for the end.So be sure to watch the entire thing.Let's start things off with the Eyedropper.I'll go ahead and click on it here in the toolbox.Now as many of you know, the Eyedropper by default is set to lift the composite color.So in other words, if I click on the model's forehead, I'm seeing the color ofthat pixel as it appears on screen, subject to all the layers working together.

Now in previous versions of the program, you've also been able to select Currentlayer, which means you'll just lift the color from the active layer.Right now in my case, it won't do me any good because I have an adjustment layer selected.You can also lift the composite version of the color on the Current layer andBelow so in other words you ignore all layers above the active layer, or here is my favorite.You can lift the composite color but ignore the Adjustment layers.So if I go ahead and choose that option and notice, I've got a total of sixadjustment layers working together inside of this image.

If I now click at that same spot, on the woman's forehead, I get an entirelydifferent, uncorrected color, as a result.Another interesting thing to note about the Eyedropper is it has for years hadthis Sample Size option.So in addition to Point Sample which lifts the color of a single pixel, you canaverage in the area that measures 11 by 11 pixels wide, around the clicked pixel.What few people know however--it's kind of a secret handshake--is that thisoption affects the behavior of, of all things, the Magic Wand tool, and so youcould actually mess up the behavior of the Wand tool, if indeed you use it, bychanging the Sample Size associated with the eyedropper.

Now however, Photoshop tells you that.If you switch to the Magic Wand tool, which you might need to select from a QuickSelection fly-out menu,then you'll see the Sample Size option right here at the beginning of theOptions Bar, and notice it has been changed to 11 by 11 Average because theSample Size setting operates in lockstep along with the Eyedropper tool.So I'll go ahead and change it back to Point Sample and that will affect thebehavior of the Eyedropper as well. All right!I'm just going to switch back to the Rectangular Marquee and I'll switch tothis image as well.

Now, when I take a look at the lightning layer here, I notice that it's set tothe Screen mode, and here's something interesting.If I turn off the layer, I can still see that it's set to the Screen mode.So instead of seeing Normal, which is what you would have seen in CS5, we seethe active screen mode,even those that are assigned to hidden layers.Still though, when I turn the layer back on, the effect that I'm seeing is notexplained by the Screen Blend mode.Somehow I'm seeing the lightning masked and portions of lightning aredisappearing, and yet I can tell by the layer thumbnail that that area outsidethe lightning is red.

Somehow it's just dropping away. What gives?Well, sometimes you run into that situation, where it's an image that you'veworked on years ago or somebody else has worked on it.It's hard to figure out what's going on.Well now we have this so-called Badge over here that tells me that there arehidden, advanced Blending options at work and if I double-click on it that Badgethen I can see, sure enough, there are settings associated with both of theLuminance sliders right here.And so the This layer slider is dropping out some of the reds on the activelayer and then the Underlying layer slider is allowing some of the highlightsfrom the clouds to show through.

So it's just a signpost to let you know what's going on.All right, I'm going to Cancel out of that dialog box.All right, a few other interesting things to note.You can rename layers in Batch.So imagine I want to convert this Background into an independent layer.Let's go ahead and double-click on it and I'll accept its default layer name.Now let's say I wanted to go ahead and rename the lightning layer and I'mgoing to call it advanced lightning and it dawns on me, wait a sec, I didn'trename the cloud layer.I can press the Tab key in order to advance to the next layer name and go aheadand call this one clouds.

If I press the Tab key again, I'll go back to the other layer name.You can also back up through layer names by pressing Shift+Tab.Photoshop has also reordered the layer effects so that they appear in the orderin which they are really applied.I'm going to go ahead and switch over to this image right here and click on theshire layer to select it, and I will press Ctrl+H or Command+H on the Mac, soI'm not seeing those path outlines.And I'll go ahead drop down to the fx icon and you'll notice, instead of DropShadow appearing at the top of the list, it appears at the bottom.

Because the way things are organized is that the Drop Shadow is applied first,Outer Glow on top of that, then the three Overlays, then Satin, Inner Glow ontop of Satin, and so on, all the way to the top effect, Bevel & Emboss.So what Photoshop is doing is showing you the way these effects are really applied.Unfortunately what you can't do is change the order of the effects.All right, now I'm going to show you one of my favorite little features of all.I've got this shire layer selected and I also have the Selection tool active.

So, you probably know this. You can press the 5 key to reduce the Opacity to 50%,or you can press the 0 key to take it back to 100%.If you press Shift along with a number, then you'll change the Fill value, thatis to say you'll reduce the opacity of the layer itself, without affecting theopacity of its effects and you can take that Fill value down from the keyboardall the way to 1% by pressing Shift+01.But you can't go, all the way to 0%, until now.

You can press Shift+00 in order to make that Fill value 0% and now we're nolonger seeing the effects of the layer.If I turn off the effects you can see it disappears.We're just seeing the layer effects by themselves.One final minor, but I think very think very important modification.You can now rasterize layer effects into a layer.And you do so by selecting the layer of course, then going up to the layer menu,choosing Rasterize, and choosing layer Style.Now as soon as I do that, we're going to lose all these effects here.

They will be merged into the layer itself and we'll see a different effect on screen.But we can fix that.So I'll go ahead and choose layer Style. That goes ahead and rasterizes the DropShadow and the Inner Shadow into this layer.The reason things looked different on screen is because our Blend mode hasbeen changed to Normal.To make things better, we just need to change the Blend mode to Multiply and weget the same effect we are seeing a moment ago.And so there you have it, a long list of a bunch of very minor enhancementsthat are going to make a big difference in the way you work here insidePhotoshop CS6.

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Q: This course was updated on 1/15/2013. What changed?

A: The course was revised to address the new Photoshop features and enhancements bundled with the Creative Cloud update released in December 2012. We added a second chapter to the course, detailing the new enhancements. We cover the Liquify and Blur Galleries, which now
support Smart Objects; creating conditional actions; auto-naming merged layers; moving a point with the Pen tool on the fly; creating global default type styles; and copying CSS code from specialty layers. We also cover two improvements to the 3D package included with Photoshop Extended: enhanced 3D lighting with 32-bit color and the new default 3D image-based light. We also updated the exercise files with new files for Chapter 2 and added an introductory video to the beginning of Chapter 2 that outlines the improvements.

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